All around the world, sports fans enjoy playing and watching the game we know as football. Globally, it is believed to be the third most popular pastime behind complaining about the weather and eating cornflakes. But in America that spot is taken by bagatelle, a game played by schoolchildren, abandoned as soon as they leave the playground.

The moment the average American male gets to college, he forgets about sport in favour of fraternity parties - debauched, drunken festivals of swearing, gambling and sexual hyperactivity - which are, ironically, the nearest thing that exists to the social life of a professional footballer. In doing so he misses out on something that is, depending on your involvement with it, very good exercise (if you play), a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon with some mates and a few beers (if you watch on television), or an occasionally diverting way of uncontrollably haemorrhaging money (if you actually go). What's more, it comes closer than anything I can think of except, perhaps, a desire that Chelsea don't win anything else this season, to uniting the world.

This has not gone unremarked on in the past. But if America's post-adolescent abandonment of football is foolish, what should it have taught us about our own mistakes? What about the sports our own school-leavers abandon, that we fail to take seriously, that we think of as child's play, a waste of our precious adult time? How much are we missing out on?

I have been watching quite a lot of horse racing recently, a diverting pastime which is ruined for me by the fact that the greatest athletes involved are horses. They are much better at running than ordinary athletes, what with having twice as many legs and stuff, but a lot worse at everything else we expect our athletes to do - post-match interviews, appearances on Question of Sport, actually recovering from injuries rather than simply being shot in the head as soon as they are sustained, that kind of thing.

All of which presents a problem for racing broadcasters, particularly when it comes to the post-race interview. They'd clearly love to speak to the horse but communication difficulties mean they have to settle for its owner or trainer, which is the equivalent to reacting to Manchester United's latest victory by interrogating Rio Ferdinand's auntie. Not that Ferdinand himself can be relied on to say anything interesting, just that it's better for these things to come from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

The obvious answer would be to replace the horses with people. It wouldn't be a totally new discipline: anyone who can remember playground life would recognise an event known as piggy-back racing. Go out and try it today: it's fun, though only if the jockey is jockey-shaped as normal-sized adults are quite heavy.

There can be few finer simultaneous tests of athleticism, dexterity and coolness under pressure than the egg-and-spoon race but we still find no place for it at the highest level. Perhaps the event could be made slightly more difficult for the fully-grown adult by extending the spoon to make it slightly harder to control - although we should make sure we don't let it get so long it becomes too hard to control. If that happens it may need to be held in a strange double-handed grip to prevent its end drooping to the floor and flipping its carrier right over, a mistake which has been made in the past and which I believe led directly to the advent of the pole vault.

Major athletics events feature no end of running, walking, jumping, throwing and waving to the crowd, but absolutely no bouncing. I can't be alone in thinking it is always fun to watch a person bounce. The ultimate test of mankind's ability to bounce at speed and in a vaguely straight line is the sack race, yet another event that we abandon much too young. Is it any wonder so many British adults are incapable of high-level bouncing? We have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Pretty much every popular sports day event deserves a little bit more attention. Admittedly, many of them seem specifically designed to make everyone involved appear as stupid as possible but the same could be said of the 20km walk, which is an Olympic discipline, or asking an English footballer/rugby player/cricketer if he is confident of winning the World Cup, and we never tire of doing that. In sport, as in so many things, we need to go back to school.